


Truth and Death

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dybbuk - Freeform, F/M, Golem - Freeform, Haunting, Jewish Mythology, Possession, violence against animals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-09-26 04:29:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20383690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: Ben opens the box.  Inside, he sees the charred remains of a helmet.------------She is made of sand-turned-clay, where other moving creatures are made of flesh and blood.  Their skin cracks in the dry Jakku sun just like hers, but they are alive in their organs.Rey is alive in a different way.





	Truth and Death

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been wanting to write a Reylo Dybbuk and Golem fic for a while, but couldn’t quite figure out the how of it until I started reading _The Golem and the Jinni_ by Helene Wecker. It’s from that novel that the idea of Rey as a Golem comes. The other main inspiration for this fic is the play _The Dybbuk_ by S. Ansky (translated by Joachim Neugrochel and Tony Kushner).
> 
> Thank you so much to politicalmamaduck & shelikespretties for editing this piece as part of Amid Secrets and Monsters. I encourage you to check out the other pieces in the collection once you’ve read this one!
> 
> There are two Hebrew words that are written in the Hebrew alphabet that appear over the course of this fic and are words that are connected with Jewish lore about the creation and destruction of Golems. They are:
> 
> אמת - Pronounced "emet" (like the name, only with equal emphasis on the second syllable) - Truth  
מת - Pronounced "met" - Death

_ אֲנִי לְדוֹדִי וְדוֹדִי לִי _

_ I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine _

_ שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים | Song of Songs _

####  א

“I have a gift for you.”

“For me?”

“An expression of goodwill. Surely your mother won’t object to that.” 

Snoke’s eyes are piercing and blue. They remind him of his uncle’s in that regard.

Ben looks down at the box that Snoke is keeping suspended in the air before him, black and square, with strange symbols he has never seen before stretching across the surface. 

“I don’t think I should,” Ben says. His mother does not trust the man who styles himself _ Supreme Leader _, the man who would create order in the Galaxy—the “First Order” the Galaxy has ever known. His mother names him a liar, a would-be dictator, and would have the Senate condemn his every movement where possible.

But his mother is also a liar. 

She lied to him about Vader, after all.

“It’s a gift. At least open it, and see what you think of it. If you do not like it, I shall take it back, with no offense taken at all.”

Ben opens the box. Inside, he sees the charred remains of a helmet.

#### ב

Rey does not remember how she came to exist, just that she did. One moment, she was the sands of Jakku, and the next she was something else. 

Perhaps there was a Maker. Perhaps there wasn’t. It would make sense that there was a Maker. There’s a carving on her forehead, and she doesn’t remember who put it there, because she certainly had no hand in it: אמת. It is not the Aurebesh that she teaches herself from the remnant spacecraft and stargear that she finds in the sands. She’s never seen anything like it—but then again, she’s never seen anything like herself before.

She is made of sand-turned-clay, where other moving creatures are made of flesh and blood. Their skin cracks in the dry Jakku sun just like hers, but they are alive in their organs.

Rey is alive in a different way.

She keeps to herself, lives in the empty shell of an AT-AT that is not far from the Niima Outpost. She likes that it is dark, and that she can do her best to keep it cool. She fears what will happen if it gets too hot. Will it turn into a kiln that will bake her into unmovingness? Will she survive such a baking?

#### ג

Unkar Plutt likes her best. She, of all his scavengers, does not need to be paid. He gives a command, and she obeys. It’s a thing that organic creatures don’t seem to understand: commands. She cannot resist them, cannot fight them. Even a droid can resist a command, but not Rey. Rey has heard the organisms talk of guts, and how things hurt in their guts when they do something wrong. Rey does not have a gut, but if she did, it would likely twist in pain and fear and wrongness if she resists the command. This is how Rey comes to understand pain. This is how Rey comes to understand that she is not free.

She hates it.

Plutt has commanded her to scavenge, and at times, to beat those he does not like. She is not a droid, nor an organic being. Her eyes do not constrict when the sun is too bright and for this they do not trust her. Plutt smiles at her fondly. She is a pet, perhaps, or a slave. Not a person with a heart. She does not have a heart, and thus cannot have feelings. And if she is not alive, she cannot have a soul. He does not need to provide her with portions. He just needs to give her some darkness, some moisture, to keep herself from cracking in the oven that is the Jakku sands. 

He commands and commands and commands, and Rey obeys for that is in her nature. She was created to obey. 

*

Were Rey human, she would call it curiosity. Were humans Rey, they would call it compulsion, the need to know, the need to understand. It takes her a long while to recognize this. 

She does not know where the compulsion to understand comes from. Her world, her days—they are simple. She is not curious to know how she got there. But sometimes, she thinks the stars whisper to her, _ know this. Understand it. _

And if she cannot resist a command from Plutt, who is she to resist the commands of the stars, whispered on the wind?

She teaches herself to read. She teaches herself to build. She does not need to teach herself to fight. She is clay, and so weapons do not harm her the way they do organic creatures and droids. Her kicks and punches are harder than durasteel. This she understands, for this is her nature, quite as much as obedience.

She must obey her nature.

Which is how she comes to hate her nature as she hates Plutt.

*

Time passes. Suns rise and set. The organic creatures around her age, but she does not. Life around her persists, while she remains unchanged.

And then, one day she sees a man being dragged through the Outpost towards Plutt’s hut. His skin is dark, he wears a brown jacket, and he is protesting. Rey does not recognize him, but if she had a heart, it would break for him. It is no pleasant thing to be dragged before Plutt like this.

She follows, not bothering to keep her distance, for it makes no difference if she is near or far.

She stands back and listens as Plutt learns who the man is—he’s with the Resistance, and they’re coming for him so he’d best be kept safe. (Rey does not know what the Resistance is, but immediately shines to them for their name and for the way the mention of their name makes Plutt’s face crease.)

His eyes land on Rey and his lips curl into a smile.

“Take this garbage where it belongs,” he sneers.

And oh—how happy Rey is to obey.

*

Her grip is strong as stone as she drags the man—resisting her with every fiber of his being—from the hut, drags him directly to the ship in which Rey has never once taken an interest because it’s garbage. But she drags him aboard and begins to power up the ship.

The man has stopped protesting. He’s staring at her in curiosity.

“Where do you belong?” she asks him.

“What?”

“Where do you belong? He commanded that I take you where you belong.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Where do you belong?” she repeats. “With the Resistance?”

He looks around. “Yeah. With the Resistance.”

So she takes him there.

#### ד

The door opens and it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He squints. 

It is not family.

They still fear him.

Good.

“Where is she, then?”

“There’s a lot going on,” says the girl. Now that his eyes are adjusting, he can see that she is light haired, and that she wears her hair in two buns—not quite the same ones that his daughter had worn when he’d first seen her, before he’d known the truth of her.

“Get out!” he hisses, straining at his bonds. Did she like it, holding him captive the way he had held her captive, destroying the order he’d sought to enforce as Tarkin had destroyed Alderaan?

She backs away, closing the door.

In their cages, the ysalamiri gulp loudly. 

She thinks she has won. And perhaps she has, because without the Force, he has never fully been a man. _ She is Padme’s daughter, after all. I should not be surprised that she is ruthless. _

He lets out a scream.

And if his grandson’s voice is laced with his own—why—what difference does it make?

_ When we are free, we will rule the galaxy as grandfather and grandson. _

The boy resists, as his uncle did before him. But he can feel the boy’s hope fading. In that, he is unlike his uncle. And in that, Vader will know victory. He will no longer be alone.

#### ה

They arrive in the Ileenium system a span of time later. The man—Finn—gives her an anxious look. “Here we are,” she says, smiling at him. He has an easy smile, Finn. Unlike every organic creature she has ever known, he doesn’t give her strange looks. It takes him a while to trust her, yes, but his distrust she is sure comes from the fact that she worked for Plutt and not from her nature.

“So—when I said I was with the Resistance,” he begins slowly. “It might have been an exaggeration.”

And there it is, that feeling of solidification inside her—as though she is turning from bendable, malleable clay into hard rock, stronger than steel and twice as old—that compulsion in her. _ Where it belongs. _

“You said this was where you belong,” she wheezes. She does not have lungs, but it is hard to breathe. 

“Listen—I didn’t mean to lie to you. I just wanted to get out. Get away. I needed to.” He’s babbling, but the stone inside Rey is grinding to dust. _ You disobeyed _ . _ You disobeyed. You disob— _ “And I don’t belong in the First Order. I don’t. I won’t go back there, I can’t. I do belong here.” He sounds panicked now, and grabs her hand. “Don’t cry—I didn’t mean to put you in a tough—” He stops talking. It is the first time he’s touched Rey’s hand and now she sees him recognize for the first time that she is not a girl, for no girl’s hand is made of stone the way hers is. 

He pauses, and takes a deep breath, looking her dead in the eye here.

“I belong here because you brought me here,” he says. “I belong here because I will belong here. Does that make sense?”

It doesn’t, but the grinding stops. If there were water to spare in her body, she would cry. But she is dry as Jakku, and so very far away.

“Come on,” he says. He is still holding her hand. “Let’s start belonging.”

*

The air is softer on here than on Jakku. Her skin does not crack and crackle, like it threatened whenever she spent too long out on the sands beneath the burning sun. It does not go as soft as mud, perhaps, but there’s a gentle sheen to it when the mists swirl around them.

It does not take Finn long to belong, just as he had told her. He makes fast friends with a pilot named Poe Dameron, and falls in love with an engineer named Rose Tico. But oddly, he does not leave Rey behind, as slowly he becomes the Big Deal in the Resistance that he had promised her. The Resistance is not like Niima Outpost. The Resistance welcomes her difference. If they are unnerved by her, it is not for the unfocused nature of her focused gaze, nor for her skin that is made of clay. Their curiosity about her always seems more directed at the unknown letters on her forehead.

“Do you know where those letters come from, Threepio?” the General asks the first time Rey meets her, calling over her gold protocol droid. 

“I have not, General,” the droid replies. “I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, but this is not an Aurebesh used in any galactic annal.”

“Hmmm.” The General’s eyes are on the letters, and Rey has no blood to make her flush, but her body rocks from side to side, anxious. “Where are you from?”

“Jakku,” she replies at once.

“And are your kind common on Jakku?”

“There are no others like me.”

The General’s eyes flicker. “Come with me,” she says after a moment, and Rey steps towards her at once, glad that the command was simple enough that the General might mistake her obedience for eagerness.

*

“I’ve seen letters like that,” the General says when she leads Rey into her study. “Please sit.” (Rey has never liked the word please. Please makes it seem like she should have a choice, a softening of the imperative. _ Sit _ is still there, for all the General said please.) 

Rey sits.

“Can you read them?” she asks.

Rey shakes her head. That is when the General opens a desk drawer and takes out a box. “Have you seen this before?” she asks.

Rey leans closer. It is a simple black box with symbols carved along the surface. Her eyes land on one of them. “That one—that’s on my head,” she blurts out, pointing.

The General nods. “I don’t suppose you know what this box is?”

Rey shakes her head, and the General sighs.

“My son received a gift in it,” she says. “And when he opened the box, he lost his mind. Sometimes, he is himself—though rarely. More rare every day. Mostly, he claims to speak with my father’s voice.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rey says quietly.

The woman looks at her sadly. “He was always a troubled child,” she says. “It comes with being powerful, I think. But this…” She looks down at her hands. “Well, it doesn’t matter.” She gazes up at Rey again, smiling sadly. “I had wondered if perhaps you’d know how to free him; how to put whatever is possessing him back in the box. But if even you don’t know what the letters mean, then I fear we’re at a dead end once again.”

“I could try,” Rey blurts out. “I could try to help. I might be able to, even if I don’t know how.”

The words hang in the air for a long moment and Rey hears them echoing through the empty caverns inside her. _ I could try to help. _ Rey has never helped anyone before. Doing what Plutt bade her was not helping. Even getting Finn off Jakku was an opportunity to help herself far more than a desire to help him.

The General looks at her for a long while. Then, slowly, she nods. “That’s a very kind offer. Thank you.”

She stands, and Rey does too, and together they walk to the door of her study. “Please,” the General says. “Please try—try to make sure he knows we love him.”

Rey gulps. And nods. 

*

The room he is being kept in is small and dim. There are windows, but he leaves the curtains drawn. There are reptiles in cages around him. He does not look at them.

He is taller than she is by nearly a foot. He stands with his shoulders squared. When he looks up—

Rey has never seen eyes like his before. 

Human eyes are complex. They show the mind, the heart, the soul. The whites of his eyes are boiling and yellowed, but the irises are blue and brown both at once.

“What’s this?” he asks. His voice rumbles low in his chest.

“Your mother sent me.”

“My mother is dead,” he replies. “She died on Tatooine many years ago. I destroyed the vermin that killed her.”

“I just saw her upstairs.”

“No. That was my daughter.”

“She said you thought you were her father,” Rey says.

“I do not think—I am.”

“Who are you?” Rey asks.

“She didn’t tell you?” He gives her a smile that she’s sure on another face would be charming. On this face it is ghastly, his lips dragging up, his eyes dazed and frightened.

Frightened?

Why is he frightened?

“Just that her son thinks he is her father,” Rey says. “Do you possess him?”

The ghastly smile gets ghastlier. 

There is a war in his eyes.

“I see you are cleverer than the others. Yes, I possess him. He is my blood, and he was stolen from me by traitors. I will have him back, and together he and I will rule the galaxy.”

“How can he have been stolen?” she asks. 

“Do you not think people can be possessions? I was. First owned by Watto the Toydarian on Tatooine, then by the Jedi on Coruscant.”

“And did you like it?” she asks. “Or would you have preferred freedom?”

“Freedom,” he sighs and an almost wistful expression crosses his face. “Padme was enamored of freedom. And so is her daughter. Freedom is a lie. No one is ever free. Not even those who hold power, for truly it is power that holds them. Would you call yourself free?”

Rey stares at him for a long while. She could lie, or she could tell him the truth. Perhaps he has not known freedom, but he has not known command as Rey knows it either. “No,” she says simply. “I would not.”

“So you want what you cannot have for my grandson?”

“Why would I want this for anyone? I do not want it for me.”

The man considers her for a long while. 

“What are you?” he asks at last, nodding to her with his eyes on her forehead. 

“I’m no one.”

“And yet you speak and think. I did not ask who. I asked what.”

“What are you?” she replies. 

He smiles. “I am a Lord of the Sith, one who knows the true power of the dark side of the Force.”

“Is that how you cling to your grandson? The Force?”

“She has kept me prisoner,” he says, gesturing to the reptiles. “They suppress the Force.”

“Then what are you?”

He smiles that ghastly smile. “I am the soul of the righteous,” he says. “I am preserved, and I will know justice. It does not matter what I am—just that I am. And you will help me.”

Rey’s mouth has never produced saliva, so it cannot go dry. Her clay only knows the moisture in the air around her, but there it is—the command she should have feared.

_ Please try to make sure he knows we love him. _

_ And you will help me. _

She looks into those roiling, boiling, fevered, frightened eyes.

_ Help me, _ she sees.

A plea from a prisoner’s heart, mixed with the command of his mouth. But if she’d taken Plutt’s _ take him where he belongs _ as bringing Finn to the Resistance, surely she can obey the plea from Ben’s lips, rather than Vader’s.

She will take what small freedoms she can find.

#### ו

Vader sleeps sometimes. Not enough for Ben to break free, but enough sometimes that he can feel quiet in his own mind. He can’t remember the last time he felt quiet in his own mind.

He must have once. When he was younger, maybe. But there were nightmares and whispers, always; a weight on his chest, a clog in his throat. They go away—finally—when Vader rests.

He wouldn’t have thought that whatever Vader is would want to rest. There’s something unnatural, something that’s not the Force about him. And yet.

He can’t speak, or Vader will wake.

He can’t move, or Vader will wake.

He can only sit there and stare at the ysalamiri in their cages, gulping at him—the only creatures in the galaxy that will ever see him again. 

The door opens and the girl from before comes in. The one who had argued with Vader. She doesn’t say anything when she comes in, moves oddly quietly. There’s something inhuman about her. He doesn’t know what it is.

She sits on the ground in front of him, her hands resting on her knees, her eyes locked with his. 

It’s that she doesn’t breathe. She’s not breathing at all. How is she alive? Is she a droid? She looks like she’s made of clay. 

But he can’t move, can’t touch her to see if that’s the truth. 

Her irises do not dilate in the darkness. They are a lovely deep hazel and despite the way her eyes do not shift around, there is an intensity to her gaze he almost shrinks from. Out of fear? Or out of hope? Hope makes him afraid these days. 

He stares at her for a long while, and she stares at him. And what peace it is—what unexpected connection. He would cry if he didn’t fear the sting in his eyes waking his captor—tears of joy, elation, hope—things he hadn’t felt in years, didn’t know he could still feel.

“Ben?” she asks at last.

And the dream ends.

#### ז

His eyes change. Where before there was a fatigue, a nervousness, a fear—they are hard now. They are the same eyes she saw the day before, feverish, yellowed, cold and cruel.

“You’ve come back,” Ben’s voice says, but they are not his words. “You’ve come to help me.”

She takes a deep breath. “I have.” _ A lie that isn’t a lie. _

“Good,” Vader replies. “What can you tell me of my daughter’s plans?”

“Little,” Rey lies. Oh, the luxury of a question. “She doesn’t confide in me.”

“And yet she sends you to interrogate me? To keep her son company.”

Rey traces the letters on her forehead. “She recognized the letters. The marks were the same as the ones on the box that contained—”

“—the helmet,” Vader breathes, his eyes now locked on Rey. “So what are you?”

“I don’t know,” Rey replies. “I’ve never met anyone else like me.”

“You have no parents?”

“No. Only me.”

Vader leans back, narrowing Ben’s eyes. “I was born in the sands too,” he tells her. “There was no father. Just me and my mother. But you didn’t even have a mother.”

“No,” Rey replies, her heart panging in her chest. An old sadness. An old loneliness. She’d seen mothers on Jakku—creatures of all shapes and sizes, fiercely protective of their own. No one was ever fiercely protective of her. “Just me.”

“It is better that way,” he says. “It will make you stronger.”

“Will it?” Rey had never heard that before, but then again, she had never understood what strength meant to the living. She was unbreakable as the earth, though she had no muscles of her own. 

“Motherhood destroyed the love of my life,” Vader replies. “It destroyed my wife. My mother’s death made me weak.”

“And your daughter?” Rey asks sharply.

“Does she not cling to the memory of a son that can no longer be?” Vader asks.

“Only because you possess him,” Rey retorts. “Perhaps she is stronger than him. She holds out hope. Do you have hope?”

“Hope.” He gives her the sort of smile that might freeze her blood if she had blood, cool and condescending. “What good is hope? Hope is the cruelest weapon. But it cannot harm me anymore, as I am teaching my grandson.”

“And yet you hope for freedom, hope that I will help you know—”

“Justice,” he says. “Through you, I will know justice. Justice for my mother, for Padme, for Obi-Wan’s betrayal. Justice for my son who destroyed me, and my daughter who reviled me and denied my truth to my only grandson. I will know justice. That is not hope. That is something else entirely.”

Rey considers.

“Sounds like hope to me,” she says, getting to her feet.

“Where are you going?”

“I shouldn’t be here,” she lies again. “If I stay too long they’ll suspect me.”

“Come again.” The command reverberates through her body. “When it is safe.”

“I will,” she says.

*

“Justice?” Leia asks her, then laughs a humorless laugh, deep in her chest. “Justice. Darth Vader wants justice? What, is he getting cold feet for murdering the Emperor and saving Luke’s life?” 

“I don’t know,” Rey replies.

“He’s a Force Ghost—my father. Anakin Skywalker. I saw him. Luke and I both saw him after the battle of Endor, smiling with Obi-Wan and Yoda. He was there. How is he also with my son now?”

“Unless it’s not him, somehow,” Rey suggests. “Or just a part of him.”

“The part of him that Palpatine corrupted, maybe. The part that was seduced to the dark side. Yes, he would think possessing my son and then being subsequently locked away would be an injustice.”

Leia is staring out of the window, her eyes trained on the comings and goings of the Resistance fighters on the main drag of the D’Qar base. 

“I thought I saw him,” Rey says. “Ben. Your son. I thought I saw him when I went in there.” 

Leia turns to her, her eyes suddenly bright. “You did?”

“His eyes were different,” she says. 

Leia sighs. “That’s how we first noticed. He was trying to pretend to be Ben for a little while, but his eyes weren’t my son’s eyes.”

“How long has he been possessed?”

“Years,” Leia replies. “It’s been nearly ten years. He was barely more than a boy when it—when he—” She shakes her head. “I haven’t seen his eyes in so long.”

“I’ll do all I can,” Rey says, and Leia sighs.

“I know, sweetheart. I know you will.”

But even as she lets herself out of the General’s office, Rey has no idea what she’s going to do, how she can possibly do anything at all.

  


#### ח

אמת

The word is burned into his mind’s eye. 

Is that her name? She hadn’t said it. She’d just looked at him like she could see him. He hasn’t been able to look at himself like that for so long. It makes him feel weak. It makes him feel strong.

But most importantly—it makes him feel as though he can feel the light again, despite Vader’s presence. He is in a pit, drowning in darkness, drowning in the very presence of someone else’s mind pressing into his own, subsuming his own, smothering his own, but now—someone’s seen a glimpse that Ben Solo existed. That he might still exist.

A frightening truth, but a truth all the same.

_ Hope is the cruelest weapon, _his grandfather had said to אמת when she had said she’d help him. 

_ And I will use it against you, _ he thinks. _ Like my mother did. _

_ She hasn’t lost hope. _

_ That is why she sent _אמת.

*

The girl is a liar. He knows this. He sees it in his waking moments, sees it in the way that she dodges and dances around his questions. 

And yet he senses a truth in that she will help him. 

He tightens his hand and stares at the ysalamiri gulping next to him. The gulping reminds him of his boyhood, of Gungan Warriors and Padme revealing that she was not an angel, but a queen.

_ Are you an angel? _

Angels have six wings, and have an ethereal beauty to them. It was the beauty he’d seen in Padme when he was still a boy. This girl has no wings, and her beauty—such as it is—is earthen, not ethereal. 

Not an angel. 

She’s not even a human, and so cannot be alive.

They are the same in that, even if she wears the same sort of white that Padme had worn on Geonosis, when first they had kissed, when he thought they’d die together and live forever.

*

The girl is not the next one to visit him. This time, it’s four recruits and a set of cuffs, and two technicians who load the ysalamir cages onto carts. 

“We’re leaving?” Vader asks.

“Wow, this one’s a real thinker, isn’t he?”

Were his powers not cuffed, he’d destroy this man, choke the life right out of him. But instead, he comes quietly.

He scans the people who are moving about, looking for the girl.

When he sees her, she is standing with two other men. Whatever they are saying to her doesn’t keep her attention, though, because her eyes slide to meet his.

He nods to her.

She nods back.

Yes. Yes, she may be a liar. But she will help him. This much he knows is the truth. The why of it all can wait.

#### ט

“How can he be possessing his grandson, and also be one with the Force?” Rey asks as she stares up at the bunk over her head. She doesn’t know why she has a bunk. She does not sleep. She wishes she could sleep. 

The bunk above her shifts, and Finn pokes his head over the edge. “How do you know he’s telling the truth?” he asks. “How do you know he’s actually Vader?”

“I don’t,” Rey says. “I don’t, but what’s the point of him lying?”

Finn laughs. “What’s the point of him lying? How about that he can trick Leia Organa into anything he wants.”

Rey frowns. “How do I find out if he’s lying?”

“How much do you know about Darth Vader?” Finn asks.

Rey shakes her head. “I don’t know anything about him.”

Because she doesn’t. She knows _ of _ Vader—Emperor Palpatine’s cruel lieutenant. But beyond his mask, she doesn’t know anything. He died before she was born.

Except he didn’t.

And Rey knows where to begin.

*

“Your daughter says that you became one with the Force,” Rey says, sitting down opposite him in the room they’ve turned into his cell. It is a brighter room, for the ship is brighter than the base on D’Qar had been. She’s more aware of how pale he is, and the dark circles under his eyes, and how the yellow fevered eyes change his face. “How can you become one with the Force and also be this?”

His lips twist in that smile. “Did my son not burn my body?” he asks. “To become one with the Force, your body must fade. How can I have crossed over while my body remained?”

Rey frowns. “I don’t know.”

“Ask my son what he thinks of that,” Vader challenges her. “Though he will not know how to answer. Souls and the Force are not the same thing. The Force beats on in every living thing, but how is it that a droid can have a soul? Or a creature made of clay?” He leans forward, his so cold despite the burning yellow. “You are made of clay. I see that now. How do you live?”

“Perhaps I live the same way you do,” she says. “Something that isn’t the Force. Something that’s—”

“You have no memory of what you were before you were this?” he asks sharply.

“Sand,” she replies, and he makes a face. “And wind. And water.”

“Fire made me,” he replies. “Look at us—all of the elements in one.” And his hand darts out to rub against the letters on her forehead and Rey’s insides harden to stone under his touch. “What does it mean, I wonder? Are you a vessel for me? Was I given to the wrong one?”

Rey recoils. 

“I have a soul already,” she says fiercely. “As does Ben.”

“You think me a parasite?” Vader asks.

“A monster.”

“I am. So why help me? Do you think that in helping me you’ll help Ben?” She doesn’t say a word. “There it is. Do you think you can free him? I’m too strong for that. I know his mind. There’s nothing he can do to be free of me. You should accept it: it is easier that way.”

*

“How’d it go?” Finn asks.

“Not according to plan,” Rey grumbles. She’s sitting with him as he eats, rolling her fingers over her legs. “I didn’t learn about him. And I think he—well, he knows I’m trying to save Ben.”

“So you think he’s not going to play nice?”

“Maybe,” she replies. “I don’t think it’ll be easy. Though,” she looks out through the mess hall. “I don’t think it was ever going to be easy.”

“No,” Finn says, his eyes a little distant. “It wasn’t.”

“I wish I knew more about the Force,” she says quietly. “Even if he can’t use it, he knows so much about it. And I don’t know anything. How can it be that he exists here and yet he’s also one with the Force?” She looks at Finn as though the answer might be written across his forehead the way אמת is written across hers.

Finn frowns. “If he can’t use it, then why do you need to know about it? It can’t help you, can it?”

“But if it—” she stops. He’s right. She hadn’t thought about it that way.

Then she smiles and gets to her feet and presses a kiss to the top of Finn’s head. “I have an idea,” she tells him.

“Good,” he smiles up at her. “Go get ‘em.”

*

“Back so soon?” Vader asks when she comes through the door again.

“Where do you come from?” she asks him, settling down opposite him. “What made you Vader?”

He raises his eyebrows. “My daughter didn’t tell you?”

Rey shakes her head. 

“Typical,” Vader says, twisting Ben’s lips in bemusement. “She hid me from her son for so long, and now would hide me from the one she sends to rescue him. Why do you want to know?”

“Because you aren’t a thing of the Force,” she says simply. “Just as I am not. You said those,” she points to the gulping reptiles on their trellises, “suppress the Force. So if they suppress the Force, and I were a creature of the Force, then they would suppress me. And you. So you aren’t of the Force. What made you? Who was Vader?”

Vader leans back, resting his head against the wall, his long dark hair falling cascading down over his shoulders. It’s in need of a wash, Rey would guess. She has always feared water without knowing its effects. She’d watched water destroy the structure of packed sand before from inside her AT-AT. Would it unmake her?

“I was formed in the flames of Mustafar,” he says at last. “Betrayal and pain, forged by friends who said they loved me, but sought only to destroy me. What sort of friendship is that? What sort of family is that?”

Rey watches him, and his anger gets so quiet she almost can’t hear it. “And she still died.”

“Who?” Rey asks, curiosity flaring, eagerness flaring.

Vader looks at her steadily. “You look like her, all in white,” he tells her. “Your hair is the same shade. Your eyes are different, though. Hers were brown.”

Rey’s eyebrows fly up. “You loved someone?”

“I tried to save her. And she chose Obi-Wan, and died. Even before she died, I lost her. Like my mother.”

He broods, staring at his hands for a long moment. “What ploy is this, trying to make me grieve and rage?” he asks her sharply. “Do you think these pains will give me compassion for the boy? Is that it? Speak honestly.”

Rey stares at him for a long while, her body starting to vibrate around her as she resists the command. Her mind cannot race for it is being dragged towards him, every clever thought she might have had voiding as her lips begin to speak honestly.

“I do not understand you,” she says. “How can I help if I do not understand you?”

“It is not your place to understand me,” Vader tells her. “It is mine to understand you. Why is it that I trust that you’ll help me, but in all else I distrust you?”

The relief of the question. _ I spoke honestly, _she tells her trembling. “What does it mean for you to trust? Did Obi-Wan,” whoever that is, “break your trust and faith in others?”

“He was my brother and he betrayed me. Why would you not do the same? The only ones who can be trusted are those whose motives you know. I do not know your motive. Therefore I do not trust you.”

“I want to help,” Rey says quietly. _ I was commanded to help. _

“And what will you get of helping? The satisfaction of knowing you have behaved with altruism?”

“I will see someone free where I cannot be,” she says and Vader raises an eyebrow.

“You aren’t free?”

Rey sits there for a long moment, a lump of clay and dumber than rocks. She’d told him. She hadn’t even told Unkar Plutt.

“What is freedom?” she asks, and Vader’s face changes.

“Who are you to speak with her voice?” he asks. “To wear white like she did when we fought for one another? _ What is freedom _?” His hand darts out and he grabs her face and pulls it towards him. He stares into her eyes. “No,” he says. “Your eyes are wrong. They aren’t hers.”

He lets her go and turns away from Rey. “Freedom.” He sighs and tilts his head back against the wall. “I haven’t thought about freedom in a long while.” He looks back at her. “Freedom is a lie.”

“Then why do you want it?” she asks sharply. “Why do you claim your grandson’s body and seek freedom from imprisonment if freedom isn’t real?”

“There is always a greater master,” he says. “The Jedi, the Sith—all serving someone or something greater than them. No one is ever truly free. You will free me, but even then I won’t be free. My body was taken from me.”

“When you killed the Emperor,” Rey says.

“On Mustafar, when Obi-Wan tried to kill me. I was more machine than man. More metal than flesh. This….” He holds Ben’s hand in front of his face. “This is the most flesh I have had since before I married her. His body is whole. His mind is weak. But this prison is better than the mask and burned lungs. What do you get from helping now, if I can never be free?”

“What do you get from possessing him, if you can never be free?” she retorts.

And Vader smiles.

“So,” he says. “You fancy yourself the hero. You think if you save me, you save him, is that it?”

Rey doesn’t reply. 

Vader’s smile widens. “Very well,” he says. “My old nemesis. The enemy in friend’s clothing. You I am used to, Obi-Wan.”

#### י

_ I will see someone free where I cannot be. _

He mulls over this for a long while. 

He has only ever been the student, the slave.

He has never been the master.

Who is her master that she is not free?

Or is it what he suspects, that her body made of clay is designed for him to possess?

_ How? _he wonders. A puzzle.

*

Long after Vader has slept, Ben stays awake. He exhausts his body for a few moments where he can control his hands, where he can listen to the sound of his beating heart and know that it is his life, his body. 

Despair has been his constant companion for years now, more pressing than any other state of being. For the first time in he doesn’t know how long, he feels hopeful.

_ The enemy in friend’s clothing, _Vader had called her.

He breathes deeply, feeling his body expand and retract around his swelling lungs.

This is his body. And this is his mind. His self. He has not felt the three connected in a long while. It is like an atrophied muscle, simply existing. Once he had been strong, and now he is weak.

But weak and hopeful is better than weak and defeated. 

His grandfather, when he wakes, will feel that hope.

_ Let him deride it, _ Ben thinks. _ Let him malign it. Let him think that it will be weak like I have been for so long. _

In the shadow of his own hope, Ben begins to think.

He has always done better in the shadows than he has in the light. 

But the thing about shadows is that they are not darkness. They cannot exist without light, and Ben cannot reach the Force, cannot use the Force at all, but that does not mean he has to dwell in darkness forever.

#### יא

“I don’t understand him,” Rey says to Leia. “He seems…”

“Crazy?” Leia suggests. “Fascist? Vader was both of those things.”

Rey frowns. _ In pain _ was what she’d been thinking of saying, but instead, she looks up at Leia. “He doesn’t seem real,” she says. 

“You think he’s lying?”

“No,” Rey says. “No, I think that he’s incomplete.”

Leia frowns. “Incomplete how?”

“I don’t understand how he can exist and be so compassionless,” she says.

“Because Darth Vader was a man without compassion.”

“But he saved your brother,” Rey replies. “Wasn’t that an act of compassion?”

Leia sighs. “Luke would say the same thing.”

“He doesn’t feel whole,” Rey says. “A distortion, or…”

She doesn’t know.

She is not human. She has watched humans, knows humans, has existed alongside humans but she is not human. She is a creature of order and humans are creatures of chaos and free will, and try as she might, Rey is not clever enough to break the bonds of command. 

_ I want to be free, _she thinks sadly. She wishes she hadn’t told him she wasn’t. That feels like a mistake. A man, distorted and broken as he might be, still has a power over her that she doesn’t have. 

Leia leans back in her chair. She eyes Rey. “That seems possible,” she says slowly before grimacing. “He showed his son compassion and saved him. Why else would he seek to crush his grandson? Unless,” she snorts derisively, “there is a difference between Luke and me. In Luke he saw himself. In me, he saw an enemy.”

_ An enemy in friend’s clothing. _

_ Even before she died, I lost her. _

_ Who are you to speak with her voice? _

“I only ever knew him as an enemy,” Leia says softly, still thinking. “The monster who held my shoulder and made me watch as my homeworld was destroyed. Who stole away Han and sold him to those who would keep him as a trophy. Luke saw him as a father. I only ever knew him as Vader.”

“And does he seem like Vader to you?” Rey asks.

Leia leans back in her seat and looks at Rey closely. “No,” she says after a long moment. “No. Vader was calm and collected. He was precise.” She grimaces. “That’s why we thought it was Ben for so long. Ben was always hot-headed in a way that Vader wasn’t.” She looks at Rey again. 

“Who was Obi-Wan?” Rey asks.

Leia frowns. “Obi-Wan Kenobi. He was a Jedi Knight. He helped train Luke. Vader killed him. Why?”

“He called him the enemy in friend’s clothing.”

Leia frowns. “They knew each other when they were younger. Obi-Wan trained him to be a Jedi. Luke would know more.” She pauses and suddenly looks away, her eyes growing bright with tears. “He went by Ben when Luke knew him. We named Ben after him.”

The clay ossifies for just a moment, and Rey feels wholly unequipped to move.

  


#### יב

It is another day before she comes back, and this time, when she does, Vader is sleeping again. She sits opposite him. She doesn’t say a word, she just looks into his eyes.

Ben takes a deep breath and clears his throat. Her eyes grow wider. Vader does not wake. 

Vader doesn’t know how to breathe in Ben’s body. It took Ben too long to realize that Vader’s soul had grown too used to his mechanical lungs. “Can you hear me?” Little more than air. No voice. Just life seeping out of his mouth and reaching her ears. So long as it is only breath, and not his voice, it is something Vader cannot take from him.

She nods.

He closes his eyes and swallows. Suddenly his throat is horribly dry. He is parched, drier than the desert. 

“Thank you.” 

She nods again. 

“I don’t know what he is,” he breathes. “But he is strong. Help me. Please help me.”

She nods and reaches for his hand. 

Her clay is cool and damp and steadying against his palm. _ Earth, _ he thinks, remembering some lesson or another from a lifetime ago, when he’d just been Ben Solo and had thought he’d known everything. _ Earth is made of death and emptiness. But it brings forth new life. _

He feels more alive than he’s felt in years, holding her hand.

He keeps his breathing steady, subtle; keeps his mind quiet. He shows control that Luke had thought he did not have, had never thought he had.

Luke had probed his mind, trying to understand why he’d behaved so erratically. Luke had woken Vader, had seen him latched onto Ben’s soul, but hadn’t known how to rid him of it all. He’d watched Vader’s rampage—or had that been Ben? Sometimes, he thinks that he and Vader have been tied together so long that he cannot always remember where one ends and the other beings.

He does not like that.

He likes her hand in his, though. Clear delineation. Connection, but autonomy. Not possession, not imprisonment. Support.

A long time ago, he remembers his mother saying _ the enemy of my enemy is my friend. _He does not now her, knows her motivations no better than Vader, but she doesn’t seem to be Vader’s ally. Oh no. She seems to be his.

“My mother sent you to help me?”

She nods.

Ben could cry.

Vader only ever barely had the self. 

Ben has his mother. He has her.

“What’s your name?” he asks her.

Her eyes widen.

The last time she spoke to him, she woke Vader. 

Her hand leaves his and his heart lurches but she has taken his palm in hers, turned it upwards and is writing letters onto his palm.

רעי

“I don’t know what that says,” he whispers. “I don’t know that Aurebesh.”

She is staring at the lettering as though confused by it, as though she doesn’t know what she’s written. When she looks back up at him, she pulls her earthen lips between her teeth, and shakes her head. _ Me neither _, her apologetic eyes say. 

“Friend,” he breathes to her. “Can I call you friend?”

She nods.

“I’m trying,” he tells her. “He’s strong, and I don’t know what I need, but I’m trying.” Then, a plea: “Don’t forget that. Don’t forget I’m trying. I won’t stop trying.”

She nods, and there’s something unearthen in her eyes now. 

Something akin to fire.

Something akin to water.

Something flickers in her eyes. Then her hand is in the air between them, extended towards him. When humans move, their muscles move elsewhere in their body. If Ben were to reach out his hand to touch hers, muscles in his chest would flex slightly with the movement. She is clay, not muscle, and her arm moves independently of her chest as she holds her hand to him.

He stares at her palm. If he touches it, will he wake Vader?

_ Hope, _ he tells himself. _ Hope that it won’t. You can’t live only in fear of him. _

He presses her palm to his.

The clay is cool, but a jolt of heat seems to shoot up his arm right to his heart the moment she touches him. His heart is racing as though he’s run a mile and excitement quickly turns to fear. _ Vader. _His heart will wake Vader.

Except, strangely, enough, it doesn’t. His eyes remain his eyes as he looks at her, and the sting of wet that pricks at the corner of them—those are his tears. Curiously, she reaches a hand up to brush a loose tear from his cheek and her other palm is as cooling as the one still pressed flat to his, a gentle cradle alongside his face before she pulls away, examining the tiny droplet on her fingertips. 

It absorbs into the clay before his eyes.

And she looks up at him, and smiles.

*

“Bring me the box,” Vader says to her and she inclines her head. “Tell her that you must get it. I’m sure she still has it.”

She stands and goes to the door. 

“Where are you going?”

“You told me to bring you the box,” she replies.

“I didn’t mean necessarily right now,” Vader says. For someone as clever as she seems to be, she is an imbecile.

She does not come back. She does not sit. Instead, she looks as though she’s going to be sick, her face contorts despite her best efforts to keep it still. It’s as though she’s in pain.

If only he had the Force, if only he could search her feelings, understand what it was that was hurting her now.

She’s shaking now, and she grabs the handle of the door and tugs at it.

_ What’s wrong with her? _His grandson is panicking. He feels his eyes moving—what is he doing? Is he trying to wrest control? How novel, he hasn’t tried anything in years. Vader smothers him, even as his eyes focus on the way that the girl has sunk to her knees.

“What is wrong? Are you breaking?”

She doesn’t reply. 

Vader knows what it is like not to be able to breathe, to feel your lungs labor but air cannot go in or out. But the girl has never breathed. She is not a living thing, but a vessel for a soul. And yet here she is, looking as though she’s choking, sand and dust gathering at the corners of her mouth and dropping to the ground like a frothing drool.

And then the words rip out of his mouth, his grandson taking advantage of his momentary distraction, his curiosity, to shout out, “Save yourself!”

At once, the girl is on her feet. She is out the door and she is gone and Vader turns his attention, for the first time in a long while, to his grandson. 

“What do you know?” he asks and he begins to peel away the boy’s mind.

It is useless to him. He is bruised and desperate, battering himself at his confines. The girl will help him, has said in all but words that she is here to help Ben Solo and not Vader. 

And then he sees it—that thing akin to fire, that thing akin to water, that thing his grandson had not known how to understand, but that thing he understands now.

#### יג

Leia gives her the box without questioning her, and Rey runs, sprints, her legs long and tireless, back to the room.

She opens the door and hands the box to Ben, and relief floods her. 

“Thank you,” he says, looking at it. Then his eyes lock with hers and there is a split second of foreboding before he says, “Kill the ysalamiri.”

Rey turns. Her hands ball into fists and she smashes the cages. Her hands unfist, they wrap around the throat of one of the reptiles. She twists. Its neck snaps. She moves onto the next. And the next. And the next. Snap. Snap. Snap.

She has hurt beings before. She has killed before. But this makes her wish she could cry. Her eyes are dry. Too dry. The clay beneath them turns to sand and scatters across the scales of the creatures, too dry to be tears, nothing but salt and horror. _ I am sorry _. 

But sorry does her no good.

Especially because her limbs freeze and cold crawls over her skin. 

Vader stands, his hand outstretched his fevered-eyes burning hotter than flame.

“Let’s see what you really are,” he says and a moment later she feels heat pressing into her skull, melting her mind as she yells, as she sobs as she pushes.

Rock is hard, and durable, but she is clay, and even rock can melt with enough heat. 

Rey feels like she’s melting. She feels as though the clay is hardening, cracking, drying, heating, melting. She feels as though the air inside her is burning up, drying her, ready to burst her into a thousand shattered pieces. It hurts.

And then it stops.

Vader’s arms have twisted, his head is thrown back, and when he speaks, it’s with two voices—one deep and gasping, the other rich and clear.

“Get out!” the voice screams and Rey stumbles towards the door. She does not know if it is a command meant for her or not, everything is burning the clay surface is bubbling, pockmarks are forming across her skin. 

“I am you!” he replies. “You are me. Just as I was Anakin Skywalker! Anakin knew freedom in death, but I did not! He died in that lava but I lived. He lived for a moment and I died, but knew no peace.”

_ Get out _ , every sinew in her body is telling her, but she can’t just leave him like this, struggling with this creature. She can’t. _ The command was for Vader, not for me, _she tells the roiling rock as with every fiber of her being. She turns. Everything in her is melting. Everything in her is falling apart.

He is clutching his face, tugging at his skin, his eyes are yellow and white, his mouth is frothing and she pushes herself towards him. _ He cannot rip his own skin off, _ she thinks wildly. _ He cannot pack it back on. _

She grabs his arms and realizes one thing: he may have the power to make her freeze and burn, but she is stronger than he is. She drags his arms away, behind and he is screaming at her. “Help me!” and which voice it is, she is not sure because her whole body is already vibrating from the _ Get out! _

_ Help me! _

_ Get out! _

_ Help me get out! _

“I don’t know how!” she chokes out.

She’s melting, she’s on fire, she’s calcifying.

Vader twists, tries to elbow her in the gut, but it doesn’t hurt any more than any other part of her does. She tries to twist his arm, but her grip slips and he’s twisting away from her, lurching towards her, attacking her, grabbing his own arm.

He slams into her and she yells and screams, her body cracking as she falls to the ground, her head slamming against—

The box. 

He realizes it’s there at the same time she does. “So, are you truly his friend?” Vader asks. “Do you want him free of this pain?”

He reaches for it—to open it—to find the helmet inside and she lifts her head and bites his forearm. He yells and she feels his fingers prying into her eye-sockets—less painful, somehow, than the way her insides are melting and skin is cracking. She bites at his palm and his hand scrabbles across her forehead, digging into the clay there.

Rey inhales.

Then exhales with a soft “oh.”

#### יד

She collapses and he watches as her skin begins to crackle, begins to turn to dust. For a moment, he feels triumph. He had defeated Obi-Wan. But how to enter the girl? With his power and her strength, he will finally be free.

*

Ben will never remember clearly what happens. He will try, but the memory will be shifting smoke, swirling ash on the wind. Voices and hallucinations as he watches his own hand dig into the first letter on her forehead and אמת becomes מת. 

In his mind’s eye, she turns to dust before him. 

She breathes.

She smiles.

She dies.

_ Water _.

She is made of clay. If she grows too dry, she will die. She will be little more than—

He won’t remember taking a deep breath and reaching into not the Force but something else, something other. How long had he tried to outline his grandfather using the Force but never once had he tried to find life in death. That is what dirt is, in the end, isn’t it? Death that brings new life? That’s what his friend was made of. 

He reaches for his own heart in a way. He’s never done that before. He’s raged and screamed and begged and pleaded, but never once has he reached for his own heart.

He won’t remember asking himself, “Did you want me to lose her too?”

“You never loved her as I loved Padme,” Vader replies in his own voice. “You barely knew her. She was a servant, a slave. Now she is free, just like Padme.”

“She isn’t,” Ben roars. “Do you really think Padme is free? There is no freedom in death, and she’s dead. She’s gone.”

“My mother only knew freedom in death.”

“No she didn’t! She married a farmer and was happy. Padme loved you and you destroyed what you had for her. You are your own injustice, not Obi-Wan, not Padme.” 

He feels his own windpipe close, feels Vader’s Force shoving itself down his throat, blocking air. _ You kill me, you kill yourself too, _ Ben thinks desperately. _ Then you’ll never be free either. You won’t have Padme and you won’t be free. _

_ Just like you always feared. _

He won’t remember how air starts to flood his lungs again, just that it does. He’s on his knees by the dust that’s slowly gathering around her. She’s so still. Her face is slack. 

_ Is that what Padme looked like when she died? _

And grief floods him. Such a deep grief, the deepest injustice of them all—that he lived and she died. That their children never knew her, that they came to hate him. He deserves that. Perhaps his grandson is right. He is his own injustice. 

That was why Anakin Skywalker was able to find peace in the Force but he was left behind, a noxious parasite whose survival meant the death of love. 

The harshest truth. 

His survival meant his mother’s death too.

Pity floods Ben.

“I do not want your pity,” growls Vader.

“What do you want then, Grandfather?” Ben asks quietly. He remembers being a boy wondering about his grandparents. He remembers being a man, confused and hurt by his mother’s lies. He remembers Snoke giving him a box with his grandfather’s helmet. But he doesn’t remember—ever—knowing what made his grandfather want what he craved. He believed the same lie that Vader told himself—that work would set him free, and when he was free, he would know peace. 

Vader flickers, and Ben wonders if that flickering is him fading, or if it’s a slightly different shade of being—not Vader—the younger Jedi, the one who died on Mustafar. _ No, not dead. Just split. Injustice living alongside justice. Balance alongside discord. Peace alongside pain. _

His eyes go to Rey. Her features are grainy, chunks of earth have fallen from her form. She is dry, a collapsed statue. Soon there will be nothing left of her.

Just like Padme.

Dead because of him.

_ You turned her against me! _

_ You have done that yourself! _

He feels his grandson’s pain, twin to his own, that _ nooooooo _that ripped out of an already blistered and raw throat.

It’s too hot.

It’s too dry.

She, too, is of a desert.

Padme was of lakes and water and gentle sunshine.

The rest he won’t remember. The rest is as a dream.

Did he dream it, as he dreams of her death, as he dreams her wasting away into bitter nothingness? He doesn’t remember when he began to hold her body close to his chest, cradling her as once Anakin Skywalker had cradled his dying mother.

Is that him, stumbling across the room towards the dead ysalamiri in their cages, dragging what parts of her have not flaked away to sand? He grabs the bowls of water they’d been drinking from and flings the water across the room towards where she is lying, drying. 

He reaches for her, he reaches for—

רעי

“Rey!” Because he could not read the letters but he knows, somehow, that that is her name.

Perhaps she calls out _ Ben! _ in response. Perhaps she doesn’t. 

Perhaps he imagines the hissing of her skin as he throws water on it, boiling it rather than absorbing it. Perhaps he imagines his uncle standing over him with a lightsaber having found Vader in his soul. Perhaps he imagines his grandfather’s furious face—younger than his own—as his fingers sink into the dirt of the ysalamir cages and he grounds himself and screams until all his blood vessels pop and his throat shreds itself.

“Please, please,” he begs himself. “I have to save her.”

This rings through his head, building and releasing through his heart, and a flicker that brightens for one brilliant moment before going dark. Knowing and likeness replaces it and he feels Vader seeping out of him, dripping off him like sweat.

Or maybe he doesn’t. Everything is hot and cold and he stumbles across the room carrying another water bowl to pour on Rey, to try and turn her back to clay.

She lived when she was clay.

She lived. 

*

He wakes in a bed, medtech beeping gently in his ears, in time with his heart.

He relishes the quiet. Vader must be asleep. He shifts, and opens his eyes.

There are no ysalamiri. And in the bed next to him, lies Rey.

There’s a heart monitor attached to her, beeping steadily.

Ben frowns. 

He detaches his reader and climbs out of the bed, wincing. Everything hurts. It’s like his whole body is heavy, like his muscles are finally bearing weight. 

He takes her hand. It’s soft, and warm, and this time it’s not—

She makes a sound in the back of her throat and her eyes flutter open. They are green and brown, the color of earth. Her lips are red, the flesh of her cheeks pinken as she looks at him.

Then she smiles. 

“He’s gone,” she says. 

Which is how Ben realizes that he’s gone. 

The heaviness he feels in his body, but he feels lightness in his head, in his heart.

“I can feel it,” she whispers, sounding dazed. She looks at her hand in his, then reaches her hand up to touch her forehead.

The scar is still there. The destroyed letters. 

“It’s warm still,” she says looking at him. “But I’m not melting.”

Her eyes are bright, and there are tears on her cheeks and tears on his own because he’s sobbing. 

He pulls her into his arms and holds her, feeling her heart—she has a heart, she has a heart and it’s alive and—

He swallows.

She’s alive.

He saved her.

He doesn’t know how he saved her, but he saved her. 

_ The Force moves in mysterious ways, _his mother likes to tell him. But he’s not sure it was the Force this time. The Force couldn’t make Rey human.

She reaches up a hand to brush the tears from his cheeks.

_ —dripping off him like sweat— _

He tries to remember but it’s hazy, like trying to see through the heat of Tatooine sands.

#### י״ה

Rey is not sure she likes being human.

For one thing, the wetness of it all is overwhelming. Sweat and saliva and piss and blood—all so wet. Her beating heart is erratic. It is slow when she is relaxed, but it beats an excited tattoo every time she sees Ben, no matter what he is doing. She wishes it would relax. It doesn’t need to do this every time she thinks of him. 

The only time she doesn’t mind it is when he takes her hand, or brushes his lips against hers. Then she likes it.

She has to remind herself to eat regularly, to drink regularly. These bodies require so much care. She is not as strong as she once was, but she’s stronger than she looks. 

“Rey, come here!” Finn calls to her when he is back from a training bout. Poe is teaching him to fly, and he’s standing there with Poe and Ben, all of them in pilot’s uniforms. _ I want to learn, I know I can, _Rey had told Leia, who had told her that she needed to rest more, recover, get used to her new body before she can dive into it. Rey had grumbled, but ultimately agreed.

Rey smiles.

There’s no compulsion to obey, no twisting and turning of her insides, no horrible crunching of her gut as she pauses to look at the three of them standing there, watching, waiting for her.

When she jogs over, it’s because she chooses to, because the only creature who can tell her what to do is herself, grinning at Finn and sliding her arm around Ben’s waist.

“In the second hour, [Adam] became a golem… During the third hour, his limbs were stretched out. In the fourth hour, the soul was cast into him…” (B. Sanhedrin 38b)

**Author's Note:**

> References:  
_Jewish_
> 
>   * [Dybbuk](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dybbuk)
>   * [Dybbuk Box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dybbuk_box)
>   * [Golem](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-golem)
>   * In Hebrew, the name Rei (רעי Re`iY) originates in biblical texts which mean "my shepherd; my companion; my friend". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei_(name))
> 
> _Star Wars_
> 
>   * [Angel](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Angel)
>   * [Ysalamiri](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ysalamiri)
> 
> I hope very much that you enjoyed! You can find me [here on social media](http://linktr.ee/crossingwinter)


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